I have been asked to dive into a Flash project that is very complex. It could take weeks to determine what the orignal developer(s) were thinking when they wrote half this stuff. Lucky for me, I have downloaded AcmeWebWork’s Admin Tool.

As far as debugging tools go, this is the best I have seen for Flash development. It exposes all of the nitty gritty programming events while the app is running, so you can trace things that are initiating the visual events on the screen.

Don’t confuse this with a hacking tool! I have heard several developers voicing their concerns about people “cracking” their Flash applications with this thing. That is not the purpose of Admin Tool, nor is it likely. In order to use the debugger (which itself is a Flash app in exe form), the developer has to open the FLA in the Flash IDE and place the Admin Tool component on the stage. This needs to be done in frame 1, of the base movie clip. In rare cases like Forms and Screens based projects, you also need to add the line:

I have become increasingly dependant upon RSS news readers lately. With all the great content being syndicated, I am always trying to shove it all into one pale for easy access.

The other day, I spent a good two hours aggregating every Flash site I could cram into my Vox lite reader program. Vox lite may not be the best one out there, but it has two features I really like. For one, its free. The other key feature: exporting/importing to OPML. The OPML format is an XML description of the feed you have subscribed to, and the associated URLs. After my exhaustive effort to find every tasty bit of Flash news out there, all you need is my OPML file and BAM! You can have all my subscriptions at you finger tips in a matter of seconds.